Carrying sound production provided by Wigwam Hire - with their visual set again dominated by the creative work of UVA - Robert '3D' Del Naja, Grant 'Daddy G' Mitchell and their tribe (including guest singer Martina Topley Bird, Debbie Miller and long-time collaborator Horace Andy) have shown they have lost none of the experimental flair and challenging production values that characterized their early work, featuring singers such as Cocteau Twins' Liz Fraser.
Common to both Bestival and their latest tour was the provision of a Martin Audio PA rig - a full W8L Longbow system on the Isle of Wight and Wigwam Hire's W8LC Compact line array on tour. The band's long-time FOH engineer is Dave Bracey, best known for his work with Robbie Williams, and his system tech is Richard 'Basil' Ferneley - another long-time Massive man.
With a pool of five backing singers (which varies from tour to tour), and new arrangements of old material to contend with (nine of the 16-song repertoire represent reworkings of back catalogue), requiring 52 inputs on the DiGiCo SD7 desk, there is plenty for Bracey to consider. The transposition of 3D's studio produced soundscapes into live profiles is something he now has down to a fine art. "The mix is totally dependent on how they play the song," he says. "it's often not possible to play it the way it was recorded, and I mix it accordingly - in many cases deliberately not having listened to the recorded versions."
Wigwam Hire have long been Massive Attack's preferred supplier, and when the Martin Audio W8LC Compact Line Array was presented as an option Bracey notes: "I was so impressed with this rig last summer, where we kept coming across it at festivals across Europe - that I chose it for this tour.
"I had been able to compare different line arrays but looking back at my favourite six gigs of last summer, it was this PA that kept cropping up.
"I much prefer the sound to anything else we could have taken out and when we opened the tour at Brixton Academy , the W8LC was the best sounding PA I have ever mixed through at Brixton. The coverage was amazing."
There will be more on Massive Attack's tour in the October issue of Lighting&Sound International.
(Jim Evans)
